Multiple winter sports incorporate twists and flips in their events so Olympics.com takes a look at how these athletes progress their skills from grounded to competition ready.
Heading to a lake on a warm summer’s day most people would don a swimsuit ahead of taking a dip. But skis? Not so much. Unless you’re a freeskier that is, then, believe it or not, this makes rather more sense.
Freeskiers, you see, are those athletes who do somersaults, flips and twists in their chosen events – whether that’s aerials, big air, slopestyle, moguls or halfpipe – and those tricks don’t just happen automatically. There needs to be a progressive element so that the tricks can be built up to competition standard safely.
The aforementioned lake is one way athletes build their tricks until showtime on the slope, providing a rather softer landing than the compact snow of competition. But there are also baby steps ahead of this one, so let’s take it from the beginning. How do freestyle athletes learn their tricks?
From the beginning
Let’s start with the finished product so we know what we’re looking at, the final product of what athletes are trying to achieve. Below are the podium-topping jumps in the men’s event of the first big air World Cup competition of the 2021/22 season, which took place in Chur, Switzerland on 24 October.
So you can’t just take off on a jump that big and hope for the best, right? So where do they even start?
One of the steps is to get used to the aerial rotation, as in, get to know exactly where they are in the air. To do this, they can take to the gym where the likes of artistic gymnasts roam, and use the facilities available such as foam pits, trampolines and crash mats. More often than not the snowsport athletes have at least a minimal gymnastics background, which helps with this aspect of their sport.
The other factor involved here is that repetitions are important, and taking to a trampoline, say, rather than a slope enables more practice as the athlete doesn’t have to keep going up and down slopes – another kind of repetition, but perhaps not the most fun one.
Different sports require different techniques as Olympian Ashley Caldwell talks about in the video below. The American shows how she uses the trampoline to practice techniques specific to aerials such as a straight body position as opposed to the bent legs and ski grabs of say, slopestyle or big air as above.
Once the trampoline aspect has been finessed, some athletes take to the diving board at a local pool to enable more practice in aerial awareness and a softer landing. This process is similar to the lake but the athlete still doesn’t wear skies at this point, the practice is all about the somersaulting or twisting rotation, with just water-slapped skin if it goes awry.
Once athletes have got the twisting element down it’s time to add the skis. Going off a ramp into a lake enables the athletes to practice their somersaults while clamped into their equipment, whether skis or snowboard. A wetsuit though is the preferred item of clothing here, rather than the ski suit, which would get rather sodden and perhaps not conducive to getting out of the water easily.
British moguls skier Leonie Gerken Schofield, who competes in the same discipline with twin brother, Tom and younger sister Kayla, shows how it’s done below.